Absolute Friends (19 page)

Up on the top deck, one of the boys is having hysterics, and that will be Polonius.

The overtall British arts diplomat with a thirty-six-hour beard who strides into the British political advisor's office close to Our Dear Führer's old Olympic stadium armed with two bulky shopping bags and a briefcase looks as if he has just come off the sea and the deck is still rolling under him, which is how he feels. The receptionist is a middle-aged Englishwoman with graying hair and nice, stern manners. She could be a schoolmistress like Kate.

"I need to speak to Mr. Arnold," Mundy blurts, slapping his passport on the counter, together with his British Council visiting card. "I've got a double-decker bus parked in your courtyard with twenty very tired young actors on board and your sentries are telling the driver to get lost."

"Now which Mr. Arnold would _that__ be, sir?" the receptionist inquires as she leafs her way through Mundy's passport.

"The one who arrived at Tempelhof yesterday evening."

"Ah. That one. Thank you. The sergeant will show you to the waiting room, and we'll see what we can do about your poor actors. Are those useful bags for Mr. Arnold or would you be wanting to leave them with me?" She has pressed a bell and is speaking into an internal telephone. "For Mr. Arnold, please, Jack. As soon as he can manage would be best. And there's a bus full of impatient actors in the courtyard to be cared for. Always the same on a Monday morning, isn't it?"

The sergeant is a benign version of the sergeant who guarded Mundy in the military hospital ten years ago. He wears a sports jacket, gray flannels and highly polished toe caps. The waiting room is Mundy's private ward without the bed: white walls, frosted windows, the same photograph of our dear young Queen. And the same chrysanthemums, courtesy of the West Berlin police. It is therefore not at all surprising to Mundy when the same vice consul ambles in--shaggy-elegant Nick Amory, wearing the same suede shoes and tweed suit that he wears for his hospital visits, and the same clever, self-deprecating smile. He is a decade older, but in a bad light he could, like Sasha, play the age he has remained in Mundy's memory. A deeper tan, perhaps, a wider brow where the hair has started to recede. A touch of frost on the ginger sideburns. A new, intangible authority. It takes Mundy a moment to realize that Amory is conducting a similar inspection of his visitor.

"Well, you look a damn sight better than when last seen, I must say," says Amory carelessly. "What's the story?"

"We've got a Polish defector on the roof of our bus."

"Who put him there?"

"We all did."

"_All__ being your acting troupe?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"This morning. In Weimar. We had a gig there."

Amory goes to the window and cautiously parts the net curtain. "He's lying very still for a liberated stowaway. You sure he's alive?"

"I've told him to shut up and lie still till we say it's safe to come out."

"_You__ told him."

"Yes."

"You run a pretty tight ship then."

"Somebody had to."

And for a while nothing but Amory's shaggy grin and the sounds of shunting traffic in the courtyard outside.

"You don't seem very pleased about it," he remarks at last. "Why are we all just sitting here? Why aren't we dancing in the streets and whistling up the champagne?"

"The boy says his family will suffer if he's identified. We've all agreed to keep mum."

"Who told you to ask for Arnold?"

"Sasha."

The smile is not a smile, Mundy realizes. If it were, it would have gone by now. The smile is what he wears while he watches you and thinks.

"Sasha," Amory repeats, after an age. "The chap you roomed with while you were playing at being a pinko. _That__ Sasha. The one who came here that day and made a stink."

"He's in the East now. He's some kind of spy."

"Yes, I think we heard that, actually. Do you know _what__ kind?"

"No."

"Did he also tell you I flew into Tempelhof yesterday evening?"

"Yes. Why?"

"It's a sort of silly code we have, when one side wants to tell the other side something frightfully important. What's in the bags?"

"Secrets, according to him. And he says the Pole's a plant but it wouldn't be sensible to do anything about him."

"For risk of compromising Comrade Sasha?"

"He said the police searches of the bus would be a sham to let the boy get through. The stuff in the bags would be safer that way."

"Well, that makes a fair amount of sense, doesn't it? Is this all he's giving us, or are we looking at trade samples with a view to placing a serious order?"

"He says he's got more."

"With you in the loop?"

"He says he's written to you. It's in the stuff."

"Is he asking for money?"

"He didn't say so. Not to me, anyway. It would be a first if he is."

"Are you?"

"No, I bloody well am not."

"What's your next move? Now? This minute?"

"Home to England."

"This afternoon as ever is?"

"Yes."

"With your actors?"

"Yes."

"Mind if I unpack my stocking? I'm going to call you Edward, if you don't mind. I think I did that before, didn't I? I've got an Uncle Ted I simply can't abide."

Still smiling, Amory empties the shopping bags onto the white plastic coffee table: the virile socialist worker, the book on the Bolshoi, the pack of Kodak film and the blue pottery box. He examines the socialist worker's glued edges, sniffs the book, turns the pack of film over with his fingertips, studies the use-by date, the customs duty stamps, holds the blue pottery box to his ear and gently rattles it, but doesn't pick at the tape that binds the lid to the base.

"And these are walnuts inside?"

"So he says."

"Well, well. It's been done before, of course. But then most things have, haven't they?" Setting the box on the table beside the rest, he lays a hand flat on the top of his head while he admires the collection. "You must have been shitting bricks."

"We all were."

"But only about the Pole. You didn't tell your troupe about _this__ lot?"--eyes drifting lazily back to the table. "They don't know about our--crock of gold?"

"No. They only know about the boy. They must be raising hell by now."

"Don't worry. Laura is feeding them buns and fizz. Did the Vopos search seriously for him, d'you think? Or was it a sham, the way Sasha said it would be?"

"I don't know. I tried not to look."

"No doggies?"

"Yes, but they didn't find him. We'd covered him with axle grease to put them off the scent."

"Edward's idea?"

"I suppose so."

"Didn't they provide you with a travel escort?"

"Yes. But she was part of the scam."

"To plant the boy on us?"

"According to Sasha, yes. Called herself Erna. Blond. Fights at about two hundred pounds."

Amory's smile widens in fond recognition. "And are we still a pinko, or have we put away childish things?" Waiting for an answer that doesn't come, Amory replaces the box of film on the table and smiles at it until it's nicely in line with the rest of his crock of gold. "Where do we live?"

"Hampstead."

"And we work full-time with the Brit. Coun.?"

"Yes."

"Twenty-four bus to Trafalgar Square?"

"Yes."

"Got anyone? Wife, friend, whatnot?"

"Wife. Pregnant."

"First name?"

"Kate. Short for Catherine."

"With a C?"

"Yes."

"Maiden name?"

"Andrews."

"British subject?"

"Yes. Schoolteacher."

"Born where?"

"Doncaster."

"Know how long ago?"

"Two years before me. April the fifteenth."

Why do I submit to this? Why don't I tell Amory to mind his bloody business?

"Well, bravo," Amory remarks, still reviewing his find. "_Very__ bravo, in case I forget to say it later. To the manner born, in fact. I'll just stick this lot in the fridge if you don't mind, then you can take me to your charges. I'm a Foreign Office flunky as far as they're concerned, so don't peach on me or I'll be mortified."

The West Berlin police station, for all Mundy knows, is the very one where he was beaten up, but in his state of dazed anticlimax he hardly cares. Amory has phoned ahead to arrange things, Amory and his sergeant have perched themselves in Mundy's place on the box next to Steve the driver and put Mundy in the seat behind them, and it is Amory, not Mundy, who orders the troupe to dismount in the windowless hangar where the bus has magically arrived. It is Amory again who with his sergeant's help gathers the troupe in a circle round him while he addresses them with just the right mix of irreverence and warning.

They've done a wonderful thing, he tells them. They've got every right to congratulate themselves.

"But we have a secret. We have actually two secrets. One of them is on the top of the bus, because we don't want his mum and dad and brothers and sisters back in Poland getting hurt. And the other one is Edward here, because if the British Council gets to hear what he's stage-managed it will pop its bureaucratic garters and Edward will be out on his ear. Smuggling refugees is not supposed to be what the Council is about. So what we're asking you to do is the hardest thing we can ask _any__ actor to do, and that's to keep your big mouths shut. Not just for tonight but forever and ever, amen."

And after the sergeant has read aloud an official declaration under the Official Secrets Act, and each one of them has separately signed an impressive form, Amory calls a jaunty _Also los, bitte, meine Herren!__ across the hangar to a squad of policemen in dungarees who promptly lay their ladders against the British Leyland bus and swarm onto the roof, barking orders at each other until, with infinite circumspection, the backdrop is laid like a precious archaeological find on the concrete floor, and unrolled. An explosion of clapping breaks out as a naked tar baby rises like Adonis from the shreds of rag and kapok and, wild-eyed in his euphoria, rushes to his deliverers and embraces every one of them, Viola last and longest. After that, everything is suddenly very quick and matter-of-fact. The police put a blanket round him and whisk him away. Viola bustles after him. One wave from the door is all she is allowed. Standing on the platform of the bus, Amory has a final word for them.

"Now the _really__ bad news is--we've got to keep Edward here in Berlin for a day or two. So I'm afraid you're going to have to say your goodbyes to him now, and leave him here to do the dirty work."

To hugs, howls and stage tears that turn to real tears, the psychedelic double-decker wheezes out of the hangar, leaving Pop to do the dirty work.

Returning to Estelle Road four days later than either he or Kate had bargained for, Mundy slips easily into his role of indignant employee. It makes no difference that he's already telephoned her on each one of those days with the same outraged message. He was incensed in Berlin, and he's incensed now.

"I mean why didn't they think of it earlier?" he insists, not for the first time--_they__ being as usual his luckless employers. "The sheer _incompetence__ is what gets me down. Why does everything have to be so bloody _hand to mouth?__" he demands, and somewhat disloyally gives a scathing imitation of his good fairy in personnel. "'Oh _goody!__ Darling Ted Mundy's in _Berlin.__ How _nice__ for him. Let's give him a few days in our office there so he can meet all the boys and girls.' Three bloody months, she's known I was headed for Berlin. Then suddenly, bingo, it's news to her."

Kate has put serious forethought into making his homecoming a success after five weeks of separation. She is waiting for him with the car when he arrives at London airport and she listens with a patient smile to his rant during the drive. But once in Estelle Road she puts her fingers over his lips and marches him straight upstairs to bed, pausing only to light a scented candle she has bought for the occasion. An hour later, they agree it's time to eat and he shepherds her to the kitchen and insists on lifting the Burgundy beef out of the oven for her and generally getting in the way in his efforts to spare her needless exertion. His gestures, like his conversation, might strike her as a little theatrical but after so much exposure to theater people, what else should she expect?

Over supper, with similar conscientiousness, he earnestly debriefs her about her pregnancy, her family, and the ructions inside the St. Pancras Labor Party. But as she obligingly chatters for him, he finds his eyes wandering furtively round the kitchen, treasuring each sacred detail as if he's just come back from hospital: the tongue-and-groove pine dresser that, with a bit of help from her dad, he ran up to her specifications, because as Des likes to say, there's a real carpenter in our Ted if he'd only put his mind to it; the nonstick saucepans that her brother, Reg, and his wife, Jenny, gave them as a wedding present; and the top-flight German washing machine and dryer that Kate bought out of her savings because she's one of the old-fashioned ones, she says, and doesn't mind admitting it: their baby's going to have real nappies, not those blotting-paper jobs with the plastic rompers.

And after leading her through every hour of the past five weeks, he goes round to her side of the table and kisses and caresses her until there's nothing to be done but go upstairs again and make more love until, bit by bit, he ventures upon a censored version of his adventures with the kids, interrupting his narrative with gusts of hearty laughter to give himself the extra thinking time, and mimicking the voices of the main players till she swears she'll be able to recognize Lexham anywhere.

"And, thank God, I don't have to go through it all again until June," he ends with a careless sigh of relief.

"Why? What's in June?"

"Oh, they want to give me _Prague__"--as if Prague is a bit of a downer.

"Whatever for?"--her wry humor at it again--"Prague's lovely."

"International dance festival. Minding the British entrants. Full subsistence, plus responsibility allowance."

"How long?"

"Ten days, I'm afraid. Twelve if we count travel."